What is your least favorite mispronunciation of an English word?
Mine would have to be the way people murder the word “poinsettia”. This is how it’s pronounced: poin-seht-ee-uh. I’ve heard people say “poin-seht-uh” and “point-seht-uh”. Do people just think that the “i” can be ignored or that you can throw a random “t” in there? My mom hates it and my grandmother hated it…lol
I also don’t like the way “Bruschetta” and “Freschetta” are pronounced. In Italian, “sch” is pronounced like “sk” not like “sh”. So it’s “Brusketta”, not “Brushetta”.
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92 Answers
Pronunciations aren’t one of my pet peeves… I’m so glad.. I’d have a headache I’m sure.
When someone is trying to “ask” by using “axe”
It bothers me when people say acrosst instead of across…
warsh instead of wash…
and Ellinios instead in Illinois.
I don’t like jewelery instead jewelry.
It is not exactly a mispronunciation, but I hate irregardless.
Also, our former Prez’ favorite nucular instead of nuclear.
I have to go with: “new q lar ” and “ash fault”.
when people say “patteren/patterun” instead of “pattern”
Illinois has a silent “s”
i.e. Ella-noy
there’s also “supposably” and “Li-berry”
When people pronounce strength and length as strenth and lenth it makes me crazy.
Another one I just remembered is when people pronounce “height” like “heighth”. My math teacher does this. He’s the one who calls on me all the time. One time he was like, “Dominic, what would be the heighth?” and I restate the question so people can hear the difference and I say “what would be the height, it would be [N].” But he stills says it. So weird…
Axe for ask, exspecially for especially (there is no x ANYWHERE in the word), pacific for specific….grrr
@unused_bagels The “li-berry” is where rednecks get books (the ones who can read)
I don’t like:
“eXpresso” (espresso)
“bat tree” (battery)
“flustrate” (frustrate)
“dickhead” (instead of my name)
Jewelry or jewellery
versus
Color or Colour
I’m torn
Psketty.
But really, only English speakers under age 6 eat that.
All the big kids eat spaghetti.
irregardless <Note that my spell checker says that’s ok… that really pisses me off.>
expesially
nucular
rut for root/route and ruf for roof
“Let me axe you a question. Can I eat my sangwitch in da liberry?
from one of my students
axe for ask drives me bananas!
And as for Bruschetta, do you pronounce the city of L.A. as “loce an-hell-aise”? After all, in Spanish, o is long, g is h, and e is ay.
My pet peeve is ‘ambalance’ for ambulance. That just makes my butt pucker!!!
I second the ‘axe’ & ‘ask’ & ‘libery’ things. UGH!!!
The name ‘Rothschild’
From Wikipedia: Rothschild (variant: Rothchild) is a German surname. The standard German pronunciation can be rendered in English pronunciation spelling as approximately “Rote-shilt”. Note that the “s” in the middle belongs to the second syllable “schild”, not the first “roth”. In English the surname is usually pronounced “Roth-child” or “Roth’s-child”.
all of these, and many more. My wife says several of these, as well as ‘alblum’ for album’ ‘flustrated’ and a few others I won’t repeat in case she reads this. It’s annoying, but if I focused on her annoying habits and not her ‘cute’ ones, we’d been divorced years ago.
I find it annoying in other folks though, and won’t hesitate to correct them.
@MrItty
“poin-seht-uh” only became acceptable because so many people started saying it. That’s how the dictionary works: when enough people say it, even though it’s wrong, they put it in there. Doesn’t mean it still isn’t wrong and completely idiotic. It makes you sound uneducated. Not sure why you would choose it. It’s the same for why “kahr-muhl” works for “caramel” and why “irregardless” is in the dictionary. Doesn’t matter how stupid it is, if enough people say it, it gets in the dictionary.
Just like the fact that “homophobia” doesn’t just mean “fear of homosexuals”, it also “hatred of homosexuals”. The difference is, though, that one is a changing definition of a word based on a changing culture. The other is ignoring a letter within a word based on laziness. I can value one over the other. But I never said I didn’t have a problem with lexicographers or the way lexicography works. That is a whole different discussion and argument.
For the last time folks, the word is CHIMNEY. It is not a chim-bly nor is it a chimmly. I think Santa should do nothing but take a dump down your CHIMNEY every year until you learn to pronounce it correctly.
Valentime’s Day for Valentine’s Day.
@augustlan…i wish i could give you a thousand points for that
Just seeing it written there is making me cringe!
How about February being pronounced “Feburary”?
@Dansedescygnes the dictionary lists how language is used. There is no “right” or “wrong”. There are no natural laws that describe how words “really” are. There is no equivalent of “1 + 1 = 2” that can demonstrably and experimentally shown to be correct or incorrect. A language exists and has rules that are made up by human beings, and changes when human beings decide it changes.
By your logic, every word that didn’t exist in Old English is wrong. Hell, every word in every Romantic language that’s not identical to its Latin predecessor is wrong.
Maybe the first few people to use words “wrong” sound uneducated. But by the time enough people are saying them that they’re in the dictionary that way? No, there is nothing wrong people learning the language from that point on using them that way. Anyone who insists on using words only as they were in dicionaries 20 or 30 or 100 years ago simply sounds arrogant and pretentious.
@Mrltty
For me, it’s a matter of the degeneration of the English language. Adding new words and changing meaning is not degenerating. What’s degenerating in my personal opinion is doing away with spelling conventions, saying it’s okay to omit a letter when you feel like it (as is the case with “poinsettia”). In my opinion, that is not good for the English language and that’s why I don’t consider it “right”. Keep in mind that “poinsettia” is one of the very few examples I can think of. People wouldn’t be bothered by the pronunciation of “poinsettia” if it was universally accepted. Clearly, it is not. Some dictionaries do not include “poinsetta” as an appropriate pronunciation of the word. And there are plenty of people that say “poinsettia”. If you just don’t want me to say it’s “wrong”, then fine, I won’t say it’s “wrong” because technically English has no official spelling conventions. Doesn’t mean I still don’t think it’s stupid and I will never ever pronounce it that way.
Pronunciation isn’t a pet peeve of mine… but chronic bad spellers are!
You seem to assume we have the correct pronunciations, English is a dialectic language constantly changing, they used to pronounce look as luke, many words were pronounce differently many years ago.
Just because it is changing doesn’t mean I have to like them changes, the same as fashion, movies, music and so on. I tend to not like it when people say thing badly on purpose, for example if they copy a rapper.
“aks” is not a mispronunciation, it’s a variant found in some dialects. Both the “ask” and “aks” pronunciations are equally old, in fact “aks” used to be the standard form. The standard written form now is “ask” but “aks” survives in some areas.
@augustlan
That annoys you, Valentime’s Day?
I used to care about people saying cause instead of because, I then realized that that was due to my own snobbery, unless you purposely say something wrong (and not always then) I will unlikely let my snobbery get into the way of a developing language.
I might as well complain at people who say can’t and wasn’t because they were introduced because of how languages evolves.
We repeat what were hear Valentine’s and Valentime’s are so similar I can’t blame people for making that mistake.
I don’t care if you don’t like something but this seems like linguistic snobbery.
Fustrated and Febuary. Hello! Frustrated is spelled with an “r” which is not silent. February is relatively simple, just sound it out, there is an “r” after the b, and like the one in frustrated, it is not silent. Another one that makes me crazy is pronouncing the “s” at the end of Illinois.
@ru2bz46 “Flustrate” isn’t a mispronunciation, at least not when I’ve heard (or used) it. It’s a portmanteau of “fluster” and “frustrate”.
@Myndecho I’ll own up to being a linguistic snob.
@aidje The first couple times I heard it, I interpreted it that way. The next time, I figured it was a little weird. After that, it was over used. Then I met the person’s family, and they all pronounce it the same way. They use the word, “flustered”, but they never use “frustrated”, only “flustrated”. By that time, I figured the whole family just copied each other’s mispronunciation. Then, I met more people from their state, and they ALL only use “flustrated”. To me, that is no longer a portmanteau, but a regional mispronunciation.
@Myndecho
There’s still a difference, though. ”‘Cause” is a shortening of a word. “Wasn’t” is a contraction of two words. “Valentime’s” is changing the entire word altogether, taking away the original word “Valentine”. That would be like saying “bercause” instead of “because”, not shortening it to “cause”. The analogy doesn’t quite work. It also brings up for the me the fact that so many people are unaware of their language. They don’t think about how things are spelled or pronounced, they just “repeat what they hear”.
@augustlan
I will admit to being a future linguistics major.
@Dansedescygnes
Many of the pronunciations we use today are incorrect from when they first started out, I did say about look and luke.
Address my other points.
@Myndecho
Yes, but I was specifically talking about your comment on “Valentime’s Day”. If I had disagreed with your other points, I probably would’ve addressed them, don’t you think? Yes, pronunciations change. “Valentime’s” Day is changing spelling conventions. “Look” going from “luke” is not changing spelling conventions. Double “o” in English can make the “oo” sound or the kind of “uh” sound found in the word “put”. The other example you provided is changing an “n” to an “m”. It’s not the same thing.
@Dansedescygnes
Does that really annoy you though? knowing that peoples accents have made it sound like a m and now people are copying that?
I did say before where I live people miss out the h in their words a lot, I don’t care as that’s how some people say things. I can still understand them they know how to spell house, horse. so I don’t understand why I would care.
@Myndecho
Omitting an “h” from a word is something that happens in certain English accents and I am aware of that. I have never heard of an “n” becoming an “m”. If it just sounds like that because of an accent, then that’s the nature of an accent. An accent is just an accent, not a willful mispronunciation. What annoys me is when people know that it’s an “n” and yet choose to pronounce it as an “m”, not just because of the way their accent sounds. Same goes for “poinsettia”. People know there’s an “i” in the word yet they decide to omit it for some reason.
@Dansedescygnes
It seems like linguistic snobbery to me, you have to say thing as I want you to. People wouldn’t just start saying Valentime just to annoy people they have picked it up and now it’s habit.
I’m trying to look for other words that have changed over time.
I see people throwing around terms like “linguistic snobbery”, and it irritates me. Words have a certain pronunciation and spelling so that we may speak and write in a way that others can understand us. It is simply effective communication to speak and spell consistently. If everybody can come up with their own way of speaking or writing a language, we won’t necessarily understand each other. When I read the posts on this or any other site, I have to interpret what the writer is actually trying to say due to misspellings and grammatical errors. If you want to be understood, use the language accurately.
@ru2bz46
No, our whole language spelling and all is changing. This is why the English language is dialectic, I did say this.
Why do you think rhyming middle English poems don’t rhyme anymore and that words have changed meaning and spelling?
@Myndecho You just made my case by responding with, “Not our whole language spelling and all change.” I have no idea what you just said.
@ru2bz46
I wasn’t finished.
Have you ever read the Canterbury tales, if makes very little sense reading it today.
^ an accident.
Just a little joke.
@myndecho Thanks for editing your response. The language evolves because people keep using it wrong. Somebody reads or hears the wrong usage and picks up on it because they are unsure of the proper usage. They assume somebody else is using it correctly, so they start using it that way. After so many people abuse a word, it becomes accepted and added or edited in the dictionaries. If everybody would learn the proper usage, pronunciation, and spelling, we would not have a problem understanding middle English poems.
@Myndecho Well, now that you edited your old response “It was a accident.”, my post looks a little silly. :(
@Myndecho
I thought I should add that almost all languages are dialectic. Dialects usually have variations in the usage of words or in the pronunciation of certain letters, but all the letters are still there. For instance, the word “water” is said in non-rhotic fashion in Boston, New York, and with some British accents (and their variants), but the “r” is still an “r”; those accents just happen to be non-rhotic by nature. “Poinsettia” on the other hand is not a regional dialect because people all over the world say “poin(t)setta”, but it is an entirely non-standard form of the word and adds letters and omits them symbolically without changing the spelling.
@Dansedescygnes
I specifically said English because I thought someone may know of a language that isn’t, braille maybe. (well that not really a language) Why is putting new letters in or taken some out, or changing a letter wrong?
@Myndecho
Because believe it or not, there are certain spelling conventions in English. Actually physically changing letters is not “wrong” per se. But that’s not what’s happening with “poinsettia”. People who say “pointsetta” still spell it “poinsettia”. English spelling conventions say that since there’s no “t” in that word, there’s no “t” in that word! And since there’s an “i” before an “a” it is to be pronounced as it is in the word “California” or “Scandinavia” or “atria”.
@Myndecho
Of course it’s not wrong, words change spelling. “Judgment” vs. “judgement”, etc. What’s wrong is keeping the spelling but acting as if the spelling should be changed, using non-standard pronunciation twists.
@Dansedescygnes
I want language to progress I’m not making it move, people say, spell things differently so I let it happen.
@Myndecho
The reason why I dislike the mispronunciation of “poinsettia” so much is that it’s so far off from its spelling and conventions that if we can pronounce it “pointsetta”, what’s stopping us from doing something like that with every word? This is just my personal opinion: I think that English should have some form of spelling conventions. “Pointsetta” is an example of spelling conventions gone down the drain. I guess some people don’t care; I happen to care; that’s just me.
@Dansedescygnes
If it’s your personal opinion I don’t mind, you don’t have to like things just because they are changes, I still like people using the correct (as most people would agree) pronunciations, but I’m not forcing my views to other people to change.
I think the changes are just as fascinating as the language itself it helps us progress and it has to change at some point.
@Dansedescygnes people just “repeating what they hear” is how people have been using language for thousands and thousands of years, and it’s worked so far.
@morphail
But I am of the persuasion that the way a language is written and the way it is spoken should be connected. Allowing “poinsettia”, for example, to be pronounced “pointsetta” does away with that connection because people are ignoring the way it is written. To me, the writing of the word is just as important as the saying of the word. People who say “pointsetta” don’t look at the word and think “P-O-I-N-S-E-T-T-I-A”, that must be pronounced “pointsetta”. They just plain don’t think about the way it’s spelled.
@Dansedescygnes
If your annoyed at how it said compared to how it’s written, wouldn’t it be better to write everything how it’s said? Away with silent letters and ph for f.
Yacht if said letter by letters sounds nothing like it should.
@Myndecho
The problem with that is that people saying things in conflicting ways. You can’t just change the spelling because some people say it one way. What about all the people who say it the other way?
@Myndecho
Uh-huh. I am aware of that. That has nothing to do with what I said, though.
I repeat: What about all the people who say it the other way? You can’t change the spelling of a word unless an overwhelming majority of the people are saying a word one way. With the case “poinsettia”, that is not the case.
@Dansedescygnes
Um I wasn’t finished sorry, it’s hard to say when it should change and I’m not the right person to ask.
The modern obsession with spelling is a fairly recent trend in the West. Differences in spelling are very often the most immediately obvious thing about a text from a previous century. In the pre-print era, when literacy was much less common, there was no fixed system and in the handwritten manuscripts that survive, words are spelt according to regional pronunciation and personal preference.
This doesn’t mean I would us to go back to this, I don’t know when it should change.
@Dansedescygnes No one is actually changing the spelling of the word. As far as I can tell, the word spelled “poinsettia” has two pronunciations: pointsettia and pointsetta.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/poinsettia
There are many many words that have variant pronunciations, this word is not special. Anyway, to complain that an English word is not pronounced the way it is spelled seems to be asking for trouble, since the connection between English spelling and pronunciation is so tenuous. English spelling was fixed in the 1600s, pronunciation has changed a lot since then.
Yes, but there are certain forms of pronunciation that remain consistent in the English language. One of which is the pronunciation of “ia”. It is always pronounced like “ee-uh”, “ee-ay”, or “yuh” depending on the word. This word is special in that it is the only word in the English language that defies the “ia” pronunciation.
It also represents the sound “eye-a” in words like “iamb” and “iatric”. In words like “acacia” and “ambrosia” it represents a schwa (“uh”), just like it does in this pronunciation of “poinsettia”.
@morphail
That’s because the consonant that precedes “ia” softens. “c” becomes “sh” (acacia) or “s” becomes “zh” (ambrosia). In order for that pattern to apply, it would have to be pronounced “poinsettcha” or “poinsesha”. Keep in mind that the original pronunciation of “poinsettia” is the way it’s spelled (poin-seht-ee-uh) and most people say that. I’ve only heard a few people say “poinsetta”, mostly on TV.
The word comes from a man named Poinsett. The ”-ia” was a suffix added on, which is common in naming something after someone. There’s a plant called hardenbergia. (Hardenberg + ia).
So we have five different ways to pronounce “ia”, I don’t see what’s wrong with a sixth. Anyway, it clearly is a widespread and standard pronunciation, since it is reported in both the OED and MW.
@Myndecho
Yes, but the thing about “poinsettia” (and I am still talking about that one word, because that’s what this thread is about) was a word formed by taking a man’s name Poinsett and adding a suffix “ia” to the end in order to name the plant after him. Just as what happened with hardenbergia (Hardenberg + -ia) and macadamia (MacAdam + -ia). In this case it does seem that the written way came first. And spelling things according to dialect might have been the way before, but it isn’t the way now. That is why we have dictionaries that set spelling for words as a standard. Can I not just think to myself that the way we spell things now is fine and that the pronunciation should correspond with the spelling? What do you think I’m going to do, start killing people who say “poinsetta”?
And the dictionaries record both pronunciations as standard. You can think that the pronunciation should correspond with the spelling, but you’d be wrong. Written language is a representation of spoken language, not the other way around.
@morphail
But “poinsettia” is an artificial word created out of someone’s name. The spelling was created to sound like poin-seht-ee-uh.
@Dansedescygnes- Incidentally, I speak a little Italian and sch is indeed pronounced like the English sh. Ch in front of an e or an i, without the preceeding s is pronounce hard, like a k. So, pronouncing bruschetta as broo-shed-uh is correct.
@Dansedescygnes
I’m curious how you know that “The spelling was created to sound like poin-seht-ee-uh.” According to the OED, the word was formed from the name “Poinsett” plus the Latin suffix ”-ia” which is used for deriving terms from names (Dahlia, Fuchsia, Lobelia), names of countries (Australia), and alkaloids (aconitia, atropia). The word first appeared in R. Graham 1836, in Edinborough New Philosophy Journal 20 412. Who knows whether Graham created the word “to sound like poin-seht-ee-uh”, or whether he just applied the standard suffix to derive a scientific term from a name.
@morphail
Well no, I didn’t mean that that was his purpose in naming it that. I just meant that was one of the results of adding the suffix because pronunciation conventions said that two t’s next to an “ia” are still pronounced like two t’s and an “ia”. But I mean, there’s nothing I can do. Once something is in a dictionary, it’s not coming out. Nothing ever leaves a dictionary until it becomes very archaic. I’ll have to wait until then…
My silent protest will just be to cringe when I hear “poinsetta” or even worse “pointsetta” and I will never ever say it any of those ways.
@Dansedescygnes- I bow to you, sir. Looking it up in one of my Italian grammar books I see that I was wrong. All this time I’d been misspelling scendere, putting an h between the c and the e. I just took the Americanized pronunciation of bruschetta and accepted it.
I frequently translate for mia moglie when she writes to her cousin in Repallo and wonder what else I’ve misspelled.
@AstroChuck
It’s funny because my mom speaks some Italian too and she had always said “Fresketta” and “brusketta” and that’s what I thought of when I saw the words written out. It was only later that I found out there was an Americanized version of the two words.
It’s sad that my grandmother isn’t still around because pronunciation, words, languages…those were all things she was interested in. And she was a stickler for pronunciation. I wish I could’ve talked to her about those things.
@Dansedescygnes
Do you really make a distinction between “poinsetta” and “pointsetta”? Do you make a distinction between “prints” and “prince”? For me they’re homophonous. I thought an epenthetic [t] was a normal consequence of the combination of /n/ and /s/ in English.
@morphail
Well, I tend to. Yes, they’re very similar, but there is a difference. The “ts” sound is harder than the “s” sound next to an “n”. Prints has a more forceful “ts” than the “s” sound in “prince”. (I just said them to myself right now…sounds different to me).
Also, when I hear “pointsett(i)a”, people say “point” and then “sett(i)a” together. It does sound different than saying “poin-sett(i)a”. The difference may be subtle, but it’s there.
lol…it even causes people to spell it wrong; look at this: http://forums2.gardenweb.com/forums/load/houseplt/msg0913105628019.html
The one that kills me is “deaf” used in place of “death.”
Also had a singing coach who insisted on yelling “pro-NOUN-see-ate” instead of enunciate.
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